July 9, 2012 issue
What we lost
By Daniel Riehl Lititz, Pa.No matter how you cut it, the U.S. lost the war in Afghanistan. Let’s get out. Now. Most of the country is under the control of the Taliban. The Karzai government is too corrupt to bring peace. We lost the Afghan government to tyrannical warlords. Two thousand American soldiers lost their lives, and tens of thousands lost limbs, eyes and their mental health.
We made thousands of Afghans angry at us because of night raids on houses of innocent people and drone attacks, which struck wedding parties and funerals. We disrespected their beliefs by burning Qurans, collecting body parts for trophies and urinating on corpses. We turned the Afghan people into our enemies.
We spent half a trillion dollars in Afghanistan. We lost that money, and with it the means to support the homeless and the unemployed, to educate the uneducated and to build up the infrastructure in our own country.
We tortured innocent Afghans. We lost the respect of the Muslim world, and we lost our innocence before a just court of international law as well as before almighty God. We trained Afghans to provide security, and they turned against the American trainers with guns supplied by us and killed them. We lost our ability to provide any security. We lost. Bring all our troops home now.
Comments
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Even better spending that half a trillion on some other government program would have been to not spend it at all given that we are carrying around over $14 trillion in debt already.
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